


to excess

by opensummer



Series: drabbles [18]
Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, canon-typical incest, which is possibly the weirdest tag i've every written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-14 21:01:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5758717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opensummer/pseuds/opensummer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There has been a death in the House of Abraxas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to excess

The House of Abraxas grieves. Seraphi Abraxas is found murdered in her chambers and her heirs descend.

Titus disappears into his whorehouses and the pleasure palaces of lesser families all eager to please a heir of the House of Abraxas. He loses himself in the petty schemes of families too small to own planets, plays politics with players who would never dare cross him at any other time. He destroys them for daring to touch him when he emerges from his grief. He begins taking baths annually as his home planet orbits the systems sun- obsessed with maintaining his youth. He is beautiful, young and cruel, precisely as his mother loved him. Death is something that happens to other people.

* * *

 

Kalique orders the death of the guard who failed to protect her mother. She arranges the funeral, manages the wake. She quietly repels fourteen assassination attempts distributed almost evenly among the Heirs of Seraphi Abraxas, first of her name, and arranges the death of four of their most significant rivals. Sibling rivalry is one thing, a break in their unity, another thing entirely. Family first, her mother had repeated until it sunk into their blood, was written into their very genes. When she takes possession of her inheritance she orders her guard to a empty planet lain fallow for the past twenty thousand years. The people before it's harvest had worshipped her mother as a god, for she had chosen to appear to them as such. She desecrates their temples for a statue- primitive but accurate and builds a shrine- 90,742 candles continuously burning. One for each of her mothers years.

* * *

 

Balem is the most prone to the excesses of their blood. His siblings believe he has gone mad when he settles for the dishonorable discharge of the lycantant that tried to rip his throat out. This is what they do not know- he had his mothers blood on his hands and he reeked of her fear and her pain. He burns her in effigy, removes the traces she left behind- a statue here, the way he tilts his head there, a planet a millennia too soon because she once set foot on it.

His mother, with vast understanding of the stars, is dead. There is nothing left.


End file.
